Antique furniture
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Very early humans were nomads, moving from location to location, and survived from only what nature provided. Furniture to them was no more than a log to sit on. As they learned to cultivate the soil, much of their survival hunting activities ceased and their need for community work grew. They established homes (very crude by today's standards) beside their cultivated land – simple huts of wood and reed, perhaps daubed with clay or mud, and later of stone and baked clay bricks.
It was this "home" and community gathering (civilization) that created the need for furniture.
The earliest furniture was understandably very primitive and only practical, but gradually the furniture also began to have more importance and it became decorated. At this point, furniture became an early status symbol. Wealthy homeowners became more refined and demanded that their furnishings reflect their status and lifestyles.
- Early furniture has been excavated from the 8th-century B.C. Phrygian tumulus, the Midas Mound, in Gordion, Turkey. Pieces found here include tables and inlaid serving stands.
- There are also surviving works from the 9th-8th-century B.C. Assyrian palace of Nimrud.
- The earliest surviving carpet, the Pazyryk Carpet has been dated between the 6th and 3rd century B.C. and was discovered in a frozen tomb in Siberia.
- Recovered Ancient Egyptian furniture includes a 3rd millennium B.C. bed discovered in the Tarkhan Tomb, a c.2550 B.C. gilded set from the tomb of Queen Hetepheres, and a c. 1550 B.C. stool from Thebes.
- Ancient Greek furniture design beginning in the 2nd millennium B.C., including beds and the klismos chair, is preserved not only by extant works, but by images on Greek vases.
- The 1738 and 1748 excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii introduced Roman furniture, preserved in the ashes of the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius, to the eighteenth century.
External links
- [Antique Furniture articles] covering many topics, at the Harp Gallery.
- [Antique Furniture Care]
- [Antique Furniture Timeline covering the period 1650 to 1950.]
- [English Periods and Styles of Antique Furniture.]
- [How To Collect Antique Furniture]
- [How To Collect Antique Toys]
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